I'm starting a separate thread for the problems I have been regularly encountering so as not to hijack/complicate the other "sound glitches" thread.

So far I have played the game for a grand total of about 3 hours and likely at least 30 or 40 quit and relaunch cycles trying out the different audio options and seeing if I can get the game to actually obey my sound settings for any length of time.

The problems I am seeing are:

0) my 0% (ie off) "atmosphere sounds" level preference is not taking effect when a saved game is loaded - this is broken 100% of the time. Going into the sound preferences and left clicking on atmosphere (or music - also set to 0%) or raising then lowering back to 0% works to stop the atmosphere sounds initially, however...

1) sooner or later (usually sooner) during gameplay atmosphere sounds (or possibly a subset of the atmosphere sounds - ie birds chirping, dripping water, etc...) become reenabled at a seemingly loud (100% ?) level. Once this happens no amount of fiddling with the sound settings fixes the problem until I quit and restart. The rather compute and resource intensive user action of changing levels/maps in the game seems to hasten the onset of this problem but is not a necessary precondition for it.

2) experimenting with the different sound drivers makes no improvement and in many cases there are more problems such as all sound stopping entirely and not coming back. The default FreeAudio choice or FreeAudo CoreAudio seem to be equivalent and about equally stable, the others almost immediately show more issues including some cackling/breakup.

3) I have had the music sound level control stop working properly as well but that was only after the atmosphere sounds had already gone haywire.

I haven't yet looked at your prefs/plist to see if there are any settings I can manually tweak with an editor that are not implemented in your GUI, I'm all ears if you have any kind of solution/workaround.

For what it is worth my setup is MacBook Pro 2.6GHz C2D 6GB Ram + 2nd display as main monitor, running the latest snow leopard release. I don't see anything in the console log for sender book_2 -- If need be I can run an instrumented debug build to help you track this issue down but unless I'm just lucky I imagine this is an easy to reproduce problem that anyone who plays with an 0% atmosphere sound preference will experience.

ihateregistering wrote:2) experimenting with the different sound drivers makes no improvement and in many cases there are more problems such as all sound stopping entirely and not coming back. The default FreeAudio choice or FreeAudo CoreAudio seem to be equivalent and about equally stable, the others almost immediately show more issues including some cackling/breakup.

I'll note that this tracks with my experience when I experimented with the various 'OpenAL' sound drivers as well - in my case, I have all the sounds on, but when I tried OpenAL, the music track (partially!!) cutout leaving me with just the drumline(!).

But, yeah, at least FreeAudio and FreeAudio CoreAudio drivers seem OK for those of us leaving the sound on! (excepting the sound 'crackle' issue that Kreador and I have encountered...

Well, I've found that the 'OpenAL Built-in Line Out' provides me with stable sound - I've given up on the music and just kept to the effects - I always found it useful in certain situations when you got audible warning of the proximity of a monster.

I have very similar problems with sound.
None of the OpenAL Drivers produce any sound here and both the FreeAudio drivers suffer from the same problems as described above by ihateregistering.
Also when setting the atmosphere volume to 0 , saving and exiting and restarting EB2, sound comes back at a very high level.

For the record once this *major sound bug* gets fixed it would be nice for the game to feel free to also use your current in game sound preferences for the main menu as well.

There is nothing quite like exiting a game that is configured for little or no sound and then suddenly being blasted out of the room by loud music at the main menu (on your way to quitting the game usually).

PS:
Let me guess the windoze version does not have any of these sound issues (despite the configuration hell that windoze represents) because QA playtesting and most development work was primarily done on it?

ihateregistering wrote:For the record once this *major sound bug* gets fixed it would be nice for the game to feel free to also use your current in game sound preferences for the main menu as well.

There is nothing quite like exiting a game that is configured for little or no sound and then suddenly being blasted out of the room by loud music at the main menu (on your way to quitting the game usually).

PS:
Let me guess the windoze version does not have any of these sound issues (despite the configuration hell that windoze represents) because QA playtesting and most development work was primarily done on it?

Just for the record, Mr. GrumpyPants, I went ahead and checked your Atmosphere bug on my "windoze" system. I was able to replicate it. So rejoice, it's not just your "Crap'n'toss" computer that's having the problem. There's no need to be a *major jerk* about it.

Furthermore, the atmospheric sounds seem to carry into the Main Menu on the way out. It happens with DirectSound as well. It doesn't seem to be an issue if you have the Atmosphere set to 10%... only when at zero.

So as a temporary measure, I would recommend leaving the Atmosphere set to 10% if you don't like the ambient noises.

The game is designed to have separate sound configs for each save. This was a heavily requested feature from couples and those who share their computers. If you're being "blasted" at the main menu, then perhaps if you don't have your computer's volume up all the way, you won't be unnecessarily startled when you exit the game.

so much for adequate playtesting on windoze then... I guess that only leaves inadequate testing... Lets hope 1.0.4 or 1.0.5 gets this patched. I am fully aware you can try to "work around" the issue at 10% volume on sounds you do not want, however trust me it does not result in merely 10% of the annoyance...

The whole point of beta testing is to get enough people using your software on heterogenous configurations and in deliberately heterogeneous ways (that is aim for 100% code, logic, and use case coverage) so this kind of stuff gets discovered and fixed before actual release or at the very least noted in a "known bugs & issue list" that is kept current and ships with the app.

Sorry for appearing "grumpy" but I just keep finding things that are not quite right in an otherwise quite polished app that I would enjoy using/playing much more otherwise. I have to wonder how the completely obvious stuff I am finding did not get discovered early on in beta testing?

Feel free to internally rephrase or sugarcoat my feedback as necessary to still get my points - PR and subtlety is not my strong point, I just want gameplay stuff fixed and/or improved so that the game is all it could be - everyone can be extra not grumpy then! Software is hard, very hard - there is no single absolute right way to go but there are many opportunities to fail to be near optimal.

I just wanted to jump in and say I'm experiencing this same problem. I am not quite as computer savy as others, so I'm not exactly sure how to adjust sound driver settings.

FWIW, I'm having this problem on a 2008 iMac.

I like to watch movies/videos in the background on my computer while playing, and any sound setting loud enough for me to hear my video results in birds blasting in my ear. (Still love the game, I'm just playing less.)